Tech Tuesday: New service helps seniors "rent a grand-kid" for tech help

GAINESVILLE, Fla. (WCJB)- Sometimes technology can be difficult to understand for some seniors but a new service in North Central Florida is helping ease that frustration

It is called Orchard and it lets seniors "rent a grand-kid for tech help".

“I still use a flip phone, so if we’re talking about other areas of my life-changing, that’s not gonna happen right now,” Jeanne Reed, a Gainesville resident who uses the service, said.

Orchard was founded by University of Florida graduate Ming Yang.

“While I was in college, I failed an entire semester driving 300 miles back down to South Florida every other weekend to help my grandma apply for social security for disability because she didn’t know how to use the computer. So I started wondering: What would of happened if i wasn’t able to be there for her?” she said.

The mission of Orchard is to help customers grow to be technologically independent.

“We have a lot of printer problems. We have had people who have had a computer in their home for months and they don’t know how to use it and they just want us to run them through the basic features,” Orchard employee Lucia Bucciarelli said.

While it is a service that can repair or teach you about your devices, it’s also building connections.

Ming is a graduate in Computer Engineering from the University of Florida. From her experience of working at Apple and Microsoft, Ming learned to combine her empathetic intuition with her technical depth to create Orchard. Sahil is an Industrial Engineering student at the University of Florida.

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